Nova Scotia Book Award winners

Six writers have been named winners of the 2025 Nova Scotia Book Awards.

The winners for the six awards were selected from finalists announced earlier this spring. They were announced at an event on June 2 during the Atlantic Book Festival.

Andrea Currie won the Evelyn Richardson Nonfiction Award for Finding Otipemisiwak: The People Who Own Themselves (Arsenal Pulp Press). In the book, Currie, a Metis Sixties Scoop survivor, shares her story of a childhood in which she felt like she never belonged and her journey to reconnecting with her birth family in adulthood.

Susan LeBlanc won the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award for fiction for The Nowhere Places (Vagrant Press/Nimbus Publishing), a novel set in Halifax’s North End in 1979 that traces the lives of a teenage girl and a middle-aged woman whose lives intersect for one important year.

Journalist Martin Bauman won the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, Non-Fiction for Hell of a Ride: Chasing Home and Survival on a Bicycle Voyage Across Canada (Pottersfield Press), in which he shares the story of a 7,000-km solo bike ride he took across Canada in 2016.

The Dartmouth Book Award was awarded to Charlene Carr for We Rip the World Apart (HarperCollins), a multi-generational story that tells of the lives of Black women who fled Jamaica in the 1980s.

The George Borden Writing for Change Award went to OmiSoore H. Dryden for Got Blood to Give: Anti-Black Homophobia in Blood Donation (Fernwood Publishing).

Cory Lavender won the Maxine Tynes Nova Scotia Poetry Award for Come One Thing Another (Gaspereau Press).

The winners of the Atlantic Book Awards will be announced at an event on June 5.